Once she wondered if he would stop if she dared go to him and then she remembered how he had driven her out of the room and thought that perhaps the sight of her might make him worse.  Even when she pressed her hands more tightly over her ears she could not keep the awful sounds out.  She hated them so and was so terrified by them that suddenly they began to make her angry and she felt as if she should like to fly into a tantrum herself and frighten him as he was frightening her.  She was not used to any one’s tempers but her own.  She took her hands from her ears and sprang up and stamped her foot.

“He ought to be stopped!  Somebody ought to make him stop!  Somebody ought to beat him!” she cried out.

Just then she heard feet almost running down the corridor and her door opened and the nurse came in.  She was not laughing now by any means.  She even looked rather pale.

“He’s worked himself into hysterics,” she said in a great hurry.  “He’ll do himself harm.  No one can do anything with him.  You come and try, like a good child.  He likes you.”

“He turned me out of the room this morning,” said Mary, stamping her foot with excitement.

The stamp rather pleased the nurse.  The truth was that she had been afraid she might find Mary crying and hiding her head under the bed-clothes.

“That’s right,” she said.  “You’re in the right humor.  You go and scold him.  Give him something new to think of.  Do go, child, as quick as ever you can.”

It was not until afterward that Mary realized that the thing had been funny as well as dreadful—­that it was funny that all the grown-up people were so frightened that they came to a little girl just because they guessed she was almost as bad as Colin himself.

She flew along the corridor and the nearer she got to the screams the higher her temper mounted.  She felt quite wicked by the time she reached the door.  She slapped it open with her hand and ran across the room to the four-posted bed.

“You stop!” she almost shouted.  “You stop!  I hate you!  Everybody hates you!  I wish everybody would run out of the house and let you scream yourself to death!  You will scream yourself to death in a minute, and I wish you would!”

A nice sympathetic child could neither have thought nor said such things, but it just happened that the shock of hearing them was the best possible thing for this hysterical boy whom no one had ever dared to restrain or contradict.

He had been lying on his face beating his pillow with his hands and he actually almost jumped around, he turned so quickly at the sound of the furious little voice.  His face looked dreadful, white and red and swollen, and he was gasping and choking; but savage little Mary did not care an atom.

“If you scream another scream,” she said, “I’ll scream too—­and I can scream louder than you can and I’ll frighten you, I’ll frighten you!”